Voting rights get bipartisan boost

Four days before the nation celebrated the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 85th birthday, a small, bipartisan group of congressmen offered the slain civil rights leader -- and this country -- an unexpected gift.

This surprising mix of Republicans and Democrats introduced a bill to fix much of the damage the Supreme Court did last year to the Voting Rights Act, which was born of a voter registration drive that King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference launched in 1965 in Selma, Ala. In June, the top court struck down a portion of the nearly 50-year-old law that required states with a history of voting rights abuses to get federal clearance before making any election changes.

“It was a really extraordinary event, a bipartisan and bicameral act,” Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said of the bill, which has co-sponsors in both the House and Senate. Its backers include Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., who was badly beaten in 1965 when police and state troopers brutally attacked a voter registration march in Selma. Another key supporter is Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., a longtime GOP champion of the federal voting rights law.

When the Voting Rights Act was reauthorized in 2006, Henderson told me, Sensenbrenner “stood in the well of the House and almost single-handedly beat back four hostile amendments, passage of anyone of which would have forced the civil rights community to abandon the legislation.”

Under the new proposal, any state or locality will be subject to this “preclearance” requirement -- something that angers a lot of conservatives -- if it commits at least five voting rights offenses in the most recent 15-year period. However, attempts to enact voter ID requirements are excluded from this consideration -- which made a lot of liberals holler.

While the legislation has a rough path to travel to win passage, its chances of being enacted in the GOP-controlled House have been strengthened by the ability of a small group of Democrats and Republicans to produce a bill that gives something to each side. Winning approval in the Senate, which Democrats control, is thought to be an easier task.

“The fact that there has been this coming together on the Voting Rights Act shows the strength of the support in both parties,” Henderson said. That’s a stretch -- but not a big one.

The support for this compromise bill also brings together legislators with widely divergent ideologies: Rep. Spenser Bachus, R-Ala., and Rep. Bobby Scott, D-Va.; Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., and Rep. Steve Chabot, R-Ohio. The bill’s backers hope House Majority Leader Eric Cantor will throw his support behind the bill. Last year, shortly after he accompanied Lewis to Selma to commemorate the 1965 voting rights march, Cantor gave a nod to the possibility that Congress might patch the hole the Supreme Court put in the Voting Rights Act.

“I’m hopeful Congress will put politics aside, as we did on that trip, and find a responsible path forward that ensures that the sacred obligation of voting in this country remains protected,” Cantor told The Hill.

I can’t think of a better birthday present that Congress can give King than to scale its partisan divide and fix the hole the Supreme Court tore in this nation’s Voting Rights Act.

DeWayne Wickham, dean of Morgan State University’s School of Global Journalism and Communication, writes for USA TODAY.